Prefontaine Memorial Run

NSP Meditations, Sports

Hundreds of spectators gathered around the starting line of the 42nd annual Prefontaine Run in Coos Bay, Oregon. It was a Saturday morning in September. Drizzle fell.

I left Portland at five-thirty in the morning to witness the event. I wanted to see for myself if Steve Prefontaine’s legend still wielded significant magic, and if there was something new to his incredible story that’d I missed or hadn’t yet imagined. And I wanted to determine if Pre’s metaphor still ran strong for me and, perhaps Oregon.

By the time I’d arrived, the high school and college cross country teams had already started ten minutes earlier. A couple hundred competitors were stretching and adjusting their high tech watches and cameras mounted on their heads. I noticed about a dozen older men wearing singlets that read Men of Oregon Club.

What does it mean to be a man of Oregon today? Does the question even matter?

Two drones hovered overhead. A DJ played music, including a track from Boston’s debut album. It staggered me to realize that Pre was dead before that record hit the charts. He was also gone before disco’s heyday.

I waited five minutes for the 10k race to begin and surveyed downtown Coos Bay, once one of the richest cities in Oregon, and a county that voted for George McGovern over Richard Nixon in the 1972 Presidential election. George McGovern! In rural Oregon! Only one reason for that: unions.

Downtown Coos Bay felt grim. Boarded up apartments and businesses. Stores hanging on by a cobweb. Could it ever rally?

Almost everyone I saw appeared happy. They were out on the street participating in something positive. Running! They were making their own culture, not consuming it.

One dude stood out: a Jesus look a-like sporting a mustache identical to the won Pre wore at the 1972 Olympics when he inexplicably went against his spirit and held back in the race. He should have run the blood-doping Europeans into the ground. Why Pre didn’t is an enduring mystery of Oregon’s sporting history.

I also saw three homeless men in their 70s camped along the route. Chances were they hailed from Coos Bay. They might have known Pre in his youth, partied with him. They might have been loggers or fishermen or drywallers. Now they were splayed on sidewalks but they still chose a choice spot to see the race. Think about that choice.

The music stopped. An official broadcast information about the course. She called out the names of two men who had run the previous 41 races. She introduced Pre’s sister, Linda, who held up a starter’s gun, then fired it.

Cheers abounded and the runners took off.

Watching it all, I felt happier than I had in a long time. Watching people of all ages run can do that to a person. There is nothing more sublime and thought provoking than running. You’re in your head even if you’re listening to music. It’s even better when you run with dogs on a socialist Oregon ocean beach.

I wandered around Coos Bay and then walked to Marshfield High School, Pre’s alma mater. All racers crossed the finish line on the track where Pre introduced himself to the track and field world 55 years ago.

On my walk, I saw a dozen parked cars and RVs that were housing people. I saw several more homeless men. I also noticed men and women with visible meth scars. Some were walking to the school, perhaps to see their children finish the race, perhaps hoping meth skipped a generation.

School busses from Washington, California and Oregon filled the side streets leading to the school. Where is Pre’s story landing with these youth? They are here, in his hometown, running.

I made my way inside the stadium and it was packed with spectators. The high school and college teams were hanging out, goofing around, cheering, clapping. I watched the winner of the open event cross the finish line. It was the Jesus dude and he burned up the last hundred yards with a ferocious kick! It was all pretty damn exciting and made me want to take a jog right then and there.

Where does a competitive run like this, created by Pre’s legacy, take us? Into the past or forward? When you run, you feel free, jaunty, hopeful, a believer, unless you are running from something. But even that means you are on the move. Got to move.

Oregon Tavern Age: The Narrows

NSP Meditations, Oregon Tavern Age

Crater Lake was mostly shrouded in fog and wildfire smoke, so my associate and left after a brief visit. We hit the road on Highway 138 and just when I thought OTA was just about gone, there appeared The Narrows, a rectangular wooden joint across the road from the Lower Umpqua River, a few miles east of Glide. All around the building were burned trees and blackened landscape from a 2020 forest fire that roared through the canyon. That The Narrows survived this conflagration is, well, a miracle…or maybe not, as I was about to learn.

We ordered our drinks from a convivial female OTA bartender. Three other OTAs nursed beers and nobody was playing the slots, something unheard today in OTA country.

On television, the Ducks were clobbering the Buffaloes in a meaningless but lucrative allegedly amateur football game. Country music from the 70s played on the jukebox.

The décor was mostly typical OTA roadhouse stuff, antlers and photos of famous dead patrons. But two stuffed owls mounted on the wall made it memorable. Stuffed owls! With rhinestone eyes! Praise the Lord! These creatures so warmed my heart with their ultimate sacrifice.

We sat at far table and admired a large black and white poster of an older bearded man holding an acoustic guitar who bore a a remarkable resemblance to Papa Hemingway if Papa had ended up an aging folk rocker and hadn’t blown off his head with an elephant gun. I had to know who the mystery man in the poster was so I went up to the bartender to ask about him and request a pen because mine had died.

The bartender handed me a pen. One of the OTAs remarked that people didn’t write in longhand anymore. I said I did and still wrote letters and post cards, not that anyone wrote back. He said he’d recently thought about writing his son a letter. Do it! I screamed. Nothing excites people like getting a real letter or post card. Damn right, the bartender said.

She did not know the identity of the man in the poster. It had been the subject of much speculation among the regulars and several maintained it was the late great country singer/actor Hoyt Axton who apparently once owned a cabin on the Lower Umpqua.

Hoyt Axton! Of Gremlins fame where the cute furry demons killed him in some horrific manner? How in the world could that be?

The bartender walked over to the jukebox and punched up some Hoyt Axton. It occurred to me that we might be the only people in a world of eight billion souls listening to Hoyt Axton at the time.

Hoyt sounded great, not like modern crap country and its phony narratives of an America that never existed. It’s all nostalgia today.

My associate dialed up images of Hoyt on her phone for comparison to the poster. The Ernest Hemingway look-a-like was not Hoyt Axton. That was plain.

But who was he? The bartender said the owner bought the poster somewhere in Oregon years ago and then hung it up in the joint six years ago when she took over.

The truth will probably never be known. Good!

As for The Narrows miraculous survival from the forest fire, it was no miracle. As the bartender recounted it, when all seemed doomed and the non-local firefighters said it couldn’t be saved and they had to move on and rescue homes, the OTAs rallied, broke out the hand tools and chainsaws and cut a fire break around The Narrows. Others hosed down the roof and outbuildings.

Doubtless they were drinking the whole time.

Oregon Tavern Age: Lorna

NSP Meditations, Oregon Tavern Age

One recent Saturday afternoon I found myself sitting at a high table inside the dark and tiny lounge of the Reedsport Lanes bowling alley.

Bowling alley? Sure, why not? They are certainly more interesting than brew pubs and at least bowling alleys have the decency to segregate the snot noses and booger chompers (playing on their tablets) from the drinking clientele.

Can a bowling alley define itself as OTA country? You’re goddamn right it can! There’s always a superbly weird and fantastic story in bowling alleys, particularly in rural areas and ones that serve gizzards and deep fried green beans.

Reedsport Lanes has such a story, perhaps the greatest unwritten love story in modern Oregon history. Her name was Lorna. She was a wife and mother. She was a champion bowler for 40 years. She seems to have lived a secret life as a lesbian and traveled all over the country in the 60s, 70s and 80s with four other probable lesbians from Reedsport who rounded out a killer five-butch team that dominated Oregon female bowling leagues and tournaments for almost four decades! Jesus! That’s a lot of lesbian bowling with five women in chain motel rooms when Al Green ruled the charts! Hello Des Moines!

How do I know all this? Easy. It’s documented in several extraordinary scrapbooks shelved in the bowling alley that I discovered five years ago and knew instantly upon that discovery that I had struck pure story gold. One day these scrapbooks might disappear so I have considered stealing, I mean preserving, them.

In the future, I might write up Lorna’s forbidden saga, although clandestine love stories involving rural dyke bowlers with knowing or unknowing logger and fishermen husbands is not something I typically write about.

No one else in the history of American literature has either.

Sometimes, a writer has to challenge himself. So do others in life stuck in ruts and going nowhere.

I sat with my back to the wood paneling and surveyed the room. All five slot machines were occupied by five OTA women with the approximate combined age of 450 years.

Two more OTA women using walkers ambled in. One of them held a can of Bud Light.

I gathered none of the OTA women bowled. They were gamblers.

One of the machines opened up. I play exactly once a year, usually two bucks worth.

I slapped in a couple of crinkled ones. A few minutes later I cashed out after winning $16!

That payment was undoubtedly courtesy of Lorna from the great beyond. Call it an advance. She’d just hired me to ghost up her kink Reedsport story and insisted I don’t tell it slant! There had already been way too much of that in her life.

Oregon Tavern Age: FDR

NSP Meditations, Oregon Tavern Age

Six OTAs sat at the bar in Drain’s Rose Garden on a Sunday morning. Looking over them was a massive taxidermied head of an elk. According to a plaque it was shot in 1974.

The Rose Garden is an excellent OTA joint but new management recently spruced it up and that never sits well with me. Worst yet, they removed the lending library.

I sat at a table ten feet from the men. I wrote in my notebook and ate my breakfast. At the bar, the men drank coffee, ate their breakfast, and talked about Portland.

Portland?

Oh sure, they knew everything bad about Portland even though none of them had visited in years or ever. I didn’t catch all their disparagement but it was of the usual Fox news/talk radio propaganda.

Not too long ago these men would have been talking about hunting, fishing, fornication, drinking, trucks or some old story of absurd and distinctly rural miscreant behavior.

Portland?

A I have written before, storytelling in OTA has almost entirely disappeared thanks to Donald Trump and Fox News. I witnessed it with my own two ears. It wasn’t immediate with his election in 2016; it took a few years.

How in the world these men could think they spoke with any authority or reality about Portland is something that is impossible to fathom.

Was I going to get up and educate these men?

No. I was too busy writing notes about my visit to the Drain pioneer cemetery 15 minutes earlier and how exquisitely beautiful all the blackberry-riddled coyote scat looked spread through a graveyard gone to see. Was their something to the tricksters’ habit of taking their shits almost precisely on the middle of the nicest marble markers on dead people named Myrna and Fred? Yes, I’m sure there was.

It was time to go and return to Portland after a superb visit to Coos Bay to witness the Steve Prefontaine Run and renew my love affair with the gritty and golden town of Reedsport. One of the greatest unwritten stories of forbidden Oregon love happens to be shelved in Reedsport’s bowling alley. I hope to write it one day.

I went up to the bar to pay my check. I stood behind the OTAs. They had moved on from ripping Portland.

One of the men was bitching about Democrats. The other men agreed. They were the cause of all evil in America.

Another man said, “He fired it all.”

Fired?

The man continued by saying that one President started it all. He couldn’t recall his name. He was President during the Depression. What was his name?

“FDR,” said another man. “It was FDR.”

“Oh yeah, that was his name.”

FDR! Was it finally time to break my longstanding rule of never politicking in OTA country? I established it 25 years ago when I moved to the Oregon Coast and had upheld it since then.

I am nothing less than a professional historian when it comes to the Great Depression, New Deal (especially in Oregon) and FDR. I could tear these dumb old men in Drain a collective new one and relish every second of the tearing.

“HEY DUMBSHITS. YOU CASHED YOUR SOCIAL SECURTY CHECKS TODAY? YOU TURNED ON THE LIGHTS THIS MORNING AND THERE WAS ELECTRICITY?”

I said nothing, paid, tipped big, and left.

Almost Gus

NSP Meditations

Sunday noon. A volunteer at the county animal shelter led him into a graveled fenced area where I was waiting. Apprehension gripped me. Was it finally time to get a dog? And was it this particular dog, Gus?

Seven years had passed I euthanized Sonny the Husky after a remarkable 17-year run that also included time with Ray the shepherd and Jo Jo the rottweiler. I said goodbye to Sonny after a final visit to the beach with her as the process of my personal extinction and state-sponsored annihilation were just beginning and I didn’t know if I would or could survive.

A volunteer released Gus from the leash and the shepherd/husky mix darted to a far corner and hid under a bench. I called out to him. Nothing. The volunteer called out to him. Nothing. Gus stood up and sniffed around the fence. I tossed some treats his direction. No interest.

It would take serious commitment to restore Gus’ health and spirit. Was he too far gone? Was I ready to take on this responsibility? I’d never owned a dog in a big city nor away from the beach.

A great friend sent me a link to Gus’ profile on the shelter’s web site. He’d been there for a few weeks. His face looked incredibly sad. He was described as despondent. Someone had rescued him under an elevated freeway near the industrial section of inner southeast Portland, across the Willamette River from downtown. It was the area of a dozen or so long-time, addled and squalid homeless encampments, many that had been swept and re-swept. Gus’ rescuer speculated that the dog’s owner was a former resident of one of the encampments. Who really knew?

Naturally, I was drawn to Gus’ story. Our intersection seemed cosmic. A writer who interacts with the homeless and writes almost exclusively about them adopts a homeless dog who was formerly living in a homeless encampment. It was practically a Hallmark movie of the type Hollywood should be making.

Gus finally trotted over—to the volunteer, not me. He hid behind her. I talked to Gus, sat down on the ground, and beckoned him over. No go.

I tossed a few more treats at him. He hesitated, then ate them. I scooted closer and held out my hand. I stood up. Gus came up and I petted him. He was at least 20 pounds underweight. He didn’t really respond to the petting but he didn’t cringe, either. I suppose that was a start.

The decision was made: I was taking Gus home, but not right away. I wanted a day to think it over and prepare everything. Shelter policy would not allow a hold on Gus, but I didn’t think anyone would adopt him because the facility was only open for a few more hours and was closed the next day, Labor Day.

I said goodbye to Gus and told the woman at the counter I was adopting Gus. She was ecstatic and took my contact information. Everyone loved Gus and rooted for a miracle, but no one had yet met him in the fenced area for an introduction and possible adoption. I was the first and only person who had shown an interest.

Out in the parking lot I started crying. I called my friend and gave her the good news. Emotion overwhelmed me on the drive home. I found myself crying again in Pet Smart as I bought $300 worth of dog supplies. Back at the house, the furniture got rearranged.

A couple hours later, the phone rang. I didn’t recognized the number so I let it go to voice mail. I listened to it. It was the animal shelter: someone had adopted Gus and taken him home!

I was devastated and angry at myself. I had violated the cardinal rule of helping any human or animal in distress and connected to the homeless crisis. Act right then and there! You might not get a second chance.

Several hours later, I sat on the back deck drinking a glass of red wine and watching the neighbor’s massive Port Orford cedar sway in the breeze. My soul remained pulverized from the loss of Gus and my inaction. Still, I consoled myself with the knowledge that he had a family that would do everything they could to resurrect his spirit because they took home such a damaged dog in the first place.

I made the decision not to visit the shelter’s website and research another dog. Adoption would happen when it spontaneously happened, such as both times strays came into my life, Ray found along Highway 101 near Cascade Head, Jo Jo at a boat ramp on the Nestucca River. That spontaneity might involve driving to the shelter on a lark, choosing a dog without doing a lick of research, and taking him home right then and there.

Hundreds of tiny birds chirped in the safety of the cedar tree. Socialist squirrels appeared in the yard soliciting their freeloading handout of peanuts.

As I tossed peanuts their way, my mind returned to the shelter and how efficient and friendly the adoption service had operated, despite regular bad press in the local media.

Was there a model in there for serving the homeless? Not as in homeless people were like caged homeless cats and dogs waiting to be adopted, but something as expedient as me walking in and walking out in 30 minutes with a dog that needed housing?

A light bulb illuminated. Actually, it came on so bright it blew up.

Suppose the dozens of non profit homeless service providers funded by taxpayers were forced by the government agencies allegedly overseeing them to set up monthly events in various areas of Portland. There, the providers with keys to housing met homeless men and women in those neighborhoods who wanted into transitional and/or permanent housing and the providers GOT THEM INTO HOUSING RIGHT THEN AND THERE!

No appointments later to travel to the Old Town abyss for help. No referrals. No ID. No websites. No apps. No delays. No waiting lists. Minimal background checks. It’s an emergency so treat it like one. A single 15-minute interview. A stamp of approval and a ride to housing RIGHT THEN AND THERE.

Why in the world hasn’t this model been tried in Portland? What about a one-time pilot project? If such an event were held in my neighborhood and available housing actually existed, I would corral—no dragoon—ten homeless people that want off the streets and assist them into housing in one day. Imagine that going down all over the city once a week for six months.

If I were in charge, I’d call it Operation Gus.

Poverty, By America

NSP Meditations, Writing ,

I just finished reading Poverty, By America by Matthew Desmond, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Evicted. A sociology professor by trade, Desmond has written in plain-spoken, jargon free, ideology free prose, the most powerful and convincing book on the need to destroy poverty in this country.

According to Desmond, the means to destroy poverty are easily at our disposal, but the vast majority of Americans do not hold their elected leaders from both political parties accountable to do so. Never forget, the Democrats who controlled Congress and had a Democrat in the White House for two years post pandemic, could not raise the federal minimum wage in the aftermath of all the lip service about honoring our brave front line workers who kept us going. Biden didn’t even fight for it. He did fight for tax breaks to corporations to enact green energy projects.

And people in this country still for a little over $7 an hour.

I urge everyone reading this post to read Poverty, By America. It’s not very long. It will educate you in frank, measured tones and make you a potent weapon in effort to defeat American poverty. Reading it also might make you want to become one of those dreamers who devise bold plans to kill poverty and fight evictions and raise wages in one locale, one community, where they live.

I once had such an idea to save a rural RV park populated with mostly elderly and poor MAGA men and women, save them from the looming gentrification of RV parks that is happening all across the nation and leading to massive displacement and elderly mobile refugees.

But I didn’t get into the game like I knew I should have. Everyone was telling me to do it, but they didn’t do anything either. It was up to me to lead, and I failed.

I still hope to do that one day. It feels like pulling something off such as saving poor, socialism-dependent MAGA RV folks from double digit rent increases is a lot more important and concrete than writing a book about an issue related to poverty. But then again, Desmond wrote an American nonfiction masterpiece of reportage, social history, sociology, economics, public policy, and I know it’s going to work its way into people’s hearts and minds and inspire action, not merely charity, but real action. It did mine.

Read it.

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